As computer systems become more complex, security is becoming a greater concern. Authorization and privacy are two concerns within the security domain. Authorization issues are related to unauthorized access to computer systems or privilege escalation within a system via exploitation of holes in software. Privacy issues are related to access to sensitive data and leaking of such data via access control security holes or propagation.
In an effort to resolve security issues, dynamic information flow tracking has been used to protect systems from authorization violations and compromised privacy. Such flow tracking is typically implemented using a hardware-based approach. These approaches typically include additional hardware support for performing tracking of secure data throughout its lifetime in a system. As an example, data may be tagged with a sensitivity level, which may be located in the dedicated hardware support. During program execution, the system dynamically propagates the sensitivity level for the tagged data and detects violations of user-specified rules. However, by implementing dynamic information flow tracking using a hardware-based approach, legacy systems lacking such specialized hardware cannot perform dynamic information flow tracking. Furthermore, there is added expense and computation complexity in performing a hardware-based dynamic information flow tracking process.